1 Woman. 1 Year. 52 Craft Projects.

Why so dangerous?

• First there’s the obvious. Like the time I was dyeing a wool/silk scarf in the microwave and completely spaced on Rule #1 of microwaving and put a couple of straight pins in my ombre-dying experiment of scarf wrapped around chopstick. And felting needles, the crafty gal’s fishhook. OW.

• Money. Every craft aisle or craft store is like a densely populated drug corner. All so shiny, so ripe with possibilities. (So full of mixed metaphors. Just go with me here.) First one’s not free, kid, but it might be cheap. Just this one time, what can it hurt? ::cue dark, evil laughter::

• Time. Which subdivides into housekeeping time and cooking time.

* Space. I have seen more than one episode of Hoarders where someone says, “Don’t throw that away! I’m going to make something with that!” Some of them are even crafters, and one had a hoard of perfectly organized, plastic-binned crafty stuff — it’s just her house had been reduced to a rabbit warren by the towering piles of bins. The tricky bit is, most crafters have projects they started and put aside for a year or two, or a medium they haven’t touched since they bought it, and then suddenly it all comes together into something amazing.

• Future arthritis or carpal tunnel?

• Disappointment. There was such a beautiful vision in my head, and what I wound up with was just a sight. Sometimes it’s that my skill level isn’t up to what I want to do, sometimes I’ve half-assed a project. Both these can be fixed over time.

• Pinboard. See Time, above. Man, is that a time-suck, but it’s so inspiring too. I have a feeling a good many things I make over the next year will be projects I found there.

• Some projects tell the world that I’m a big ol’ geek. You know, the Tardis makeup case or Supernatural toilet paper cozy. There is no help for that, because I am going to make them.

• My own personal danger zone is my love for crafts with unknown outcomes. I got interested in fiber arts via a class on dyeing silk scarves with flowers and/or vegetables. Even when I tried to reproduce a color or effect exactly, I might get something entirely different. It was cool because I’m not talented at drawing or painting and I could make really beautiful things, but sometimes the results were much less exciting than I’d hoped and expected (wildflower scarves, I’m looking at you).

• Another dangerous factor for this year will be the Random Tutorial Generator. I’m going to pick a point sometime this year when I use it to determine a project, though I’ll probably mitigate the terror by giving myself a few rolls of the dice if something totally unsuitable comes up, or if I have to buy a mangle to achieve it. (Maybe I would buy a mangle. Because I just love saying mangle. (In Barney Fife humble-brag casual tone: (sniff) “Yeah, I just bought a mangle.”)